Residential care home and day centre Montornès del Vallès

The care home for 90 elderly residents and day centre with 30 places is located on a sloping plot that stands at almost two storeys high from one end to the other. Initially, an analysis was made of various possibilities of construction and a conclusion was reached: the typologies that adapted to the topography by terracing seemed to have the virtue of a lower visual impact, but had disadvantages in terms of long internal routes, visibility between rooms limiting users' privacy, and the most notable drawback was that by terracing, the building occupied practically the entire surface of the plot, leaving reduced free space, dispersed between buildings. Faced with this conclusion, we opted for a compact building, which leaves more than half of the plot free, optimises internal routes, obtains distant views for all the rooms, and reduces construction and maintenance costs. The free space is distributed in three areas: a public square giving access to the Day Centre on the lowest level of the plot, a large garden on the highest level, facing south, with therapeutic routes and connected to the living units of the Residence, and, finally, a semi-covered inner courtyard with the possibility of closing it completely in winter, which functions as a multipurpose space to hold various group activities.

The distribution of the residence on the ground floor follows a cloister layout that contains 2 living units of 18 people per floor, as required by the functional plan, but has the added value of being divided into 4 sub-units of 9 people, with independent living and dining areas. The position of the two nuclei allows, in the event of a health emergency - such as the one caused by Covid-19 in recent times - to isolate one or more sub-units depending on the needs of the situation. These sub-units are formalised in a volumetry of the building divided into 4 blocks, which apart from facilitating the orientation of the users in their movements, it minimises the urban impact of a unitary block.